“Do you want to know what the other side is like?”

A few stories for you all, one regarding a house that I used to live in, and another regarding an ex. Neither are drop-dead scary, but both kind of unsettled me at the time.

First, the house.

I lived in it with four others, so it was pretty busy. We were all students at the time, so as could be expected some of us a) got drunk a lot, and b) were awake at forsaken hours. So, when after a few weeks of living there we noticed that our basement light kept getting turned on, I didn’t really pay much attention to it, even though nobody could remember turning it on. The light for it was right next to the kitchen’s light, so I figured it would be reasonable to assume that we just kept accidentally hitting the switch or one of us was drunk and couldn’t remember doing so. Nevertheless, the basement light kept turning on. My room opened out onto the kitchen and basement; once, despite not hearing anyone in the kitchen, the light from the basement suddenly shone into my room. A little hard to explain, barring faulty wiring, perhaps.

We had a spare bedroom in this house. It was almost directly above mine, and out on a limb of the house. For my housemates to use the bathroom, they had to pass by this room. After a few weeks, they all agreed that there was something wrong with it. They shut the door to it, because it was creeping them out.

The next morning, the door had opened by itself. Nobody had any reason to go into that room, and the door was not one of these which swings open by itself. It was firmly shut. Fair enough, I think. It’s probably just the temperature changes at night, or something like that, causing it to open. So they shut the door again, for their own peace of mind. The next morning, the door is open again, and the cord for the room’s light switch is tied in an elaborate knot.

That was a little bit harder to explain.

We had a guest stay in that room, once. In the morning they asked us whether anyone else had heard the running and stomping, directly outside the room.

Nobody had.

But enough about that room. One of my housemates in particular was getting continually freaked out by these events. Things did not improve when she woke up one morning to find a dark, shadowy figure standing over her bed. She found she could not move. She shut her eyes, hard, opened them, and it was gone.

But honestly, I was never too impressed by any of this. I’m not one to believe in the paranormal. Nevertheless, I still felt a chill run down my spine when, as I was watching television one night, a pencil on the table in front of me began slowly rocking backwards and forwards.

Now, the ex. This particular ex claimed to be a medium, something which I did my best to ignore or tolerate where applicable. But two events in particular caused me to raise my eyebrows.

The first. One night, as we were lying in bed, she suddenly went very quiet. I asked her what, if anything, was wrong; and at that, she sharply sat upright, facing away from. In a quiet voice, she asked;

“Do you want to know what the other side is like?”

It looks silly seeing it written down, but her voice sounded… wrong. Distant, tinny. And as she started to talk about beautiful gardens and friends long gone, I actually felt the temperature of the room decrease significantly. The hackles on my neck began to raise. It may have been a trick of the light, but I am certain that I began to be able to see her breath in the sudden coldness of the air.

It sounds minor on paper, but it was genuinely creepy at the time. Particularly when combined with another event.

She’d been telling me that there was a spirit of some kind near a country house that we lived by. That’s rich, I thought, Spirits.

This country house was on the route of my run, and one morning out of the corner of my eye I saw what looked like a woman wearing a blue or grey gown. This is not normal attire for a morning. I looked again, and there was nothing.

Shrugged it off. Trick of the light.

A night a few weeks later, we walked past the house. As I talked to my ex, she suddenly became pale, and her gaze became fixed upon something in the distance.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“That’s her.”

I turn to see what she’s staring at, and in the distance I see what looks like a statue of a woman. The skin grey, the same shade as her dress. The statue seems to be almost glowing, which I attribute to a light catching it – country houses invariably having garden lights on at night. My ex is shivering, so I drag her away. It’s just a statue, there’s no reason for her to be getting so upset by it.

The next morning, to satisfy my curiousity, I go back to check on the gardens.

There's a possibility all of these stories are the result of drugs, mental illness, physical illness, stress, sleep paralysis, dreams, or natural phenomena misidentified. That all of these stories are the result of the story teller lying or exaggerating.
But out of all the hundreds of stories here there is also the very real possibility that perhaps one is the absolute truth, that one has no other possible explanation other than the supernatural.
The question is, which story is it and what would that suggest about the universe.